Our vision is seared by the ideas in Linked. The badnews is that the book's recurring image of the far flung network reflectsback onthe book itself. Barabási's chapters leave the reader feeling like she'sbeen dragged up and down a tortuous network of ideas, gratuitously whippedfrom one end to the other of a universe of associations. The mind bogglesas Barabási links the hacker Mafiaboy, the Apostle Paul, Gaetan Dugas,patient zero in the AID's epidemic, and Google's Larry Page. Sure, each ofthese individuals have plugged into their respective networks. But theirrelationships to these networks (and to the idea of the scale-free networkin general) are obscured by glare of their differences.
Despite this weakness, Linked is instructive reading. The bookreminds me why major league baseball is nothing if not a network (althoughnot free-scale); each team can not survive without its peers and surely league money must be more evenly distributed or the network willcollapse.
Likewise, I'm reminded that much of the glue that holds together the averagechurch lies in the interaction of the congregation: the dense mesh ofsocial relationships jerks people out of bed and into church eachweek.
And I can see how blogging may help, by replacing the watercooler, toliberatelink-craving minds from dependence on the traditional office-boundednetwork.
Finally, I sense how the atomic family, with just two lone adults nodeslinking to their children, stands little chance against the network mass ofjuvenile influences.
Buy the book. How often do you get a chance to radically alter your visionfor less than $20?
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